Cooking food, particularly meats, outdoors can take on a wide variety of strategies from high temperature direct searing beef steaks, medium indirect cooking chicken, and slow low temperature smoking of pork shoulders, and many, many others. While most outdoor cookers are best suited by design for direct heat grilling, medium temperature barbequing or slow low temperature smoking, few outdoor cookers are well suited to all of these varieties of cooking strategies. Probably the most difficult type of outdoor cooking involves slow smoking of certain meats over many hours. One outdoor cooker that has exhibited an ability to perform well in any of the cooking strategies identified above is shown in co-owned U.S. Pat. No. 7,878,186.
Because slow smoking of meats almost always avoids the direct application of heat, the '186 patent shows a typical smoker design that includes an offset firebox attached to a main cooker body. This strategy allows a fire to be built and maintained over a long cooking period without necessarily opening the cooking chamber, which could expose the meat being cooked to temperature fluctuations. Thus, replenishing a fire and/or checking the status of food being cooked can undermine the ability of the cook to maintain a desired cooking temperature, which may be less than 250° F., consistently for 10, 15 or more hours. On the otherhand, utilizing the same cooker to quickly cook hamburgers or steaks over direct high heat for a matter of minutes can be extremely elusive.
This disclosure is directed toward one or more of the problems set forth above.